Bruce Dunlop was an engineer before he became a farmer on a picturesque island off the
coast of Washington in 2002. This technical background turned out to serve him
well in producing pork and lamb to sell from Lopez Island Farm. Faced with the
financial and logistical difficulty of transporting his live animals 200 miles
to the closest USDA-permitted slaughterhouse on the mainland—a trip that
included a 45-minute ferry ride—he began designing the nation’s first mobile
slaughterhouse, in cooperation with Washington State University extension and
Lopez Community Land Trust.

A 50-something Steve Martin look-alike
with a cheery, relaxed manner, Dunlop is an unassuming pioneer. But his problem-solving
engineer’s perspective and the single-minded dedication of a true
agriculturalist make him the perfect candidate to reimagine the logistics of
small-scale meat production. And this particular corner of U.S. food production
is desperately in need of some reimagining.

The meat industry, like much else in U.S.
agriculture, has consolidated rapidly over the last half-century. According to
researchers at the University of Missouri, four giant companies—Tyson, Cargill,
Swift and Co., and National Beef Packing Co.—produced 83.5 percent of U.S. beef
as of 2007. Meanwhile, four companies—Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill, and Swift
& Co.—controlled 66 percent of the pork industry, almost double the 34
percent market share they had in 1989. Likewise, the top four chicken and
turkey producers controlled 58.5 percent and 55 percent of those markets,
respectively.

Any meat destined for sale must, by law, be
slaughtered at a USDA-inspected facility—a requirement that can be
prohibitively costly for small producers.

The rising dominance of large,
national-scale meat producers has made it increasingly difficult for operators serving
local markets with meat produced on small and mid-sized farms to stay in
business. High-volume production using industrial methods—the disturbing,
inhumane nature of which has been widely chronicled—means that smaller meat
producers cannot compete on price with the big guys.

Beyond price, small-scale operations also
find themselves stymied by logistical hurdles created by the consolidated
meat-production infrastructure. Any meat destined for sale must, by law, be
slaughtered at a USDA-inspected facility—a requirement that can be
prohibitively costly for small producers. Many independent slaughterhouses have
therefore been forced to close, leaving mom-and-pop livestock farmers with few
if any options for turning their animals into legal-to-sell meat.

It is in this context that the mobile
slaughterhouse on Lopez Island makes local slaughter available and affordable
to small farmers. On this gorgeous, evergreen-covered island and its sister
islands in the San Juan chain, a consortium of meat farmers formed the Island
Grown Farmers Cooperative to organize the building of the mobile slaughterhouse;
they also pooled resources to rent a central facility on the mainland for the
final butchering and packing. The slaughterhouse, which looks from the outside
like an average tractor-trailer, travels among the farms; farmers pay a fee for
each animal they slaughter. A USDA inspector travels with the abattoir to
certify that the meat it processes can be sold on the open market.

In the process of researching my new book
about positive action in sustainable food, I found myself stationed alongside
this unusual vehicle on the green lawn of Lopez Island Farm, watching as the slaughterhouse’s
manager and head butcher, Jim Wieringa, and his partner slaughtered and butchered
one cow, four pigs, and 14 lambs. USDA inspector Jim Donaldson, a jolly bear of
a man with a white beard, made notations on his clipboard, and meanwhile Dunlop
loaded the discarded viscera into his front-end loader for transport to his
increasingly fertile compost heap.

I’ll spare you the gory details here (though
they’re included in the book), but I can say that as a former
vegetarian I was surprised to find that watching the slaughter was minimally
traumatic. It was all so routine—so organized, controlled, and exact—and
designed to include as little mess and suffering as possible. After finishing
with each animal, the butchers sprayed the hanging carcass with a vinegar
solution to kill bacteria and then attached it to special hooks that ran along
a track in the ceiling into the truck’s refrigerated portion. The truck was
then ferried to the cooperative’s processing facility in Bow, Washington, where
the meat was further butchered and packed.

Dunlop’s loyal customers pay a premium
for his high-quality meat; even though a mobile facility is significantly less
expensive to purchase and operate than an individual stationary slaughter
facility for every farm, its low-volume processing of animals raised on pasture
still means higher prices. The facility can process relatively few animals—ten cows
per day, for instance, compared to several hundred per hour in an industrial facility.

Despite such systematic limitations, the
mobile slaughter concept is a rare remedy to the increasingly difficult situation
small-scale meat producers face, and the concept has rapidly gained traction
since Dunlop designed the first roving abattoir. He now sidelines as “a mobile
slaughter engineering consultant” with a company called TriVan Truck Body to
build more of these facilities. About a half-dozen mobile slaughterhouses were operating
in the U.S. as of the summer of 2010.

“It’s a good economic development,” Dunlop
told me. “The amount of money that went into this project to get it started... has been paid back many-fold.” Not only does the mobile slaughterhouse help
small farmers survive, it also enhances the local economy, bolsters the
self-sufficiency and cohesion of the agricultural community, and makes higher
quality, humanely raised meat more widely available.

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Katherine Gustafson
wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization
that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable
world. Katherine is a freelance writer and editor based in the Washington, DC,
area. Her first book,Change
Comes to Dinner, about sustainable
food, was published this week by St. Martin's Press.